NOVANEWS
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Tent protests panic Netanyahu (and just might shake foundations of occupation)
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Geller and Spencer’s work actually shaped Breivik’s ideas, Walt explains
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Palestinian photo-journalist says he was attacked by Israeli soldiers for ‘misrepresenting’ them
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I dreamed of Jerusalem
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LGBTs in Israel declare, our struggle is against hasbara and pinkwashing
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Boycott is a no-brainer, Nadia Hijab writes from Washington, but in a Lebanese newspaper
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Latest twist in Sanchez tailspin underscores cost of being accused of anti-Semitism
Tent protests panic Netanyahu (and just might shake foundations of occupation)
Jul 31, 2011
Dena Shunra
The Globes financial daily, which tends to lean towards free-market libertarianism, puts the word Panic in big, bold letters right over the picture of Netanyahu. (picture thanks to Didi Remez)
Netanyahu does, in fact, have something to panic about. 150,000 Israeli citizens were out in the streets, demonstrating on Saturday evening, up from 30,000 the previous Saturday. Tent encampments are popping up all over Israel, everywhere from the poshest center of Tel Aviv to the most disadvantaged cities in what they like to call “the periphery” – the hastily-built towns outside of the center, which served as place-holders to keep Palestinians from reclaiming their land after 1948, populated by state decree by the Jews brought in from Europe’s Displaced Persons camps and by the Arab Jews brought in with little say about their fate, in collusions by despotic leaders from Muslim countries and the nnw Jewish state, soon after 1948.
The first encampment started on Rothschild Avenue, where a disgruntled renter, Daphne Leef, pitched her tent. Leef, a filmmaker unable to make ends meet, declared on her Facebook page that she was moving into the boulevard until economic conditions were livable. A few others joined her, angry about the skyrocketing rents inside Tel Aviv – and the impossibility of transportation outside it with Israel’s rickety and increasingly unreliable mass transit disorganization.
This protest – at the heart of Tel Aviv’s most affluent area, by people who had played by the rules, done the required military service, studied at universities – and couldn’t make end meets even after doing all of that – struck a chord with Israelis everywhere. I counted thirty encamplents on the map here: each pin on the map signifies an encampment, with dozens of tents and slogans demanding one thing: “social justice”.
They weren’t the first group to protest this year in Israel. The doctors and medical residents have been striking for nearly half a year, demanding fair wages and livable working conditions. Dairy farmers have done so as well. University students joined in (protesting fee hikes), as did some 44 of the parliamentary assistants working with Knesset members (reported here on Wednesday) and parents, who pushed strollers in a march of despair, complaining about the high cost of childcare and demanding free education in gov’t supervised creches and preschools. Also in with the protesters were the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights, several political parties, and Rabbis for Human Rights.
These names may seem familiar to readers who have followed the protests against the occupation, but it is far from being a protest about the occupation. The reverse may be true: protesters have repeatedly said that they are “not political” – all they want is some Israeli version of the New Deal (yup. Roosevelt’s New Deal) – and they don’t want to restrict it to what has been traditionally called “the left”, which has been thoroughly rejected by Israelis. The paradigm of talking about justice and what is right to do has collapsed – to the great dismay of the few thousand Jewish Israelis who still see the world through the lens of universal justice. Out of the ashes of humanistic justice, though, one sees a new consensus arise – and one that could help bring justice to Palestine & Israel, for the first time since 1948.
Netanyahu is, as I said, panicking. Chants at the protests made sure to mention the police (notoriously low-paid, and legally prohibited from unionizing) among the sectors that needed a new deal. This so worried Netanyahu that he announced a 40% pay hike for them [http://www.iba.org.il/bet/bet.aspx?type=1&entity=751994&topic=917 – via http://dubikan.com/archives/2023 & @NitayPeretz on Twitter].
Unheard-of steps are being taken to return excess funds by the Israel Water Association, which appears to have overcharged for its services. Silvan Shalom (whose current titles is Minister for Development of the Negev and Galillee and Regional Cooperation) and Coalition Chief Zeev Elkin tried to recruit the Livni Kadima party into the government from the opposition, accusing Kadima of populism. Sunday morning, Netanyahu’s Chief of Treasury (not minister of finance – the general manager of the treasury, a position with (much) more power) quit, due to professional disagreements between himself and Treasury Minister Steinitz. Sunday afternoon, Netanyahu sent his spokesman Roni Sofer to the press, to insist that the protest is “excessive” and that “the society has stopped setting boundaries for itself.” Protest organizers laughed heartily and said that the government doesn’t know what it’s talking about – and called for a nationwide strikeMonday.
There is good reason for their assertion. Netanyahu is on film commenting on the Arab Spring revolutions. He says that the entire Middle East is shaking – except for one country, where (according to him) there is a full democracy and equal rights for everyone under the law. Here’s a remix of that clip, with scenes from the demonstrations interspersed, put together by Noy Alushe: So things are lively in Israel.
All over Israel. There are tent encampments in Jaffa and in the Levinski Park, with activists from the posher (and more Jewish) areas joining in solidarity. In Qiryat Shmona and in Baqa, in Jerusalem and in Ashdod. Blogger Kikar Hamyoashim (a pseudonym) told me that he has seen more courtesy and consideration in Tel Aviv during the protests than at other times: cars stopped for him when he came to a crosswalk four times on a single afternoon, and people said things like “please” and “thank you” and generally acted like people were not the enemy but rather, members of the same society.
The demonstrations are tweeted with the #j14 hashtag; some of the organization is being done via Facebook, some via twitter, some via telephone and by existing personal contacts. Writer Roni Gelbfish called in some writer-friends, to read to the kids living in the tent encampments. Musicians have joined in. Musicians show up, ask for a guitar (Barry Sacharoff was handed three guitars when he asked for one) and perform either impromptu or scheduled shows. Sanitary facilities spring up, and organization begins to take place, in a mode which described by City Tree activist Assaf Shuhami as a Scale-free network.
What the activists want is nothing less than an entirely new social contract. They want to roll back the Shock Doctrine privatization, and regain a security network for what used to be the middle class, before Netanyahu and the neo-liberals sold off the assets – which had originally been taken over from the Palestinians, between the end of WWI and the 1948.
They don’t just want the government to fall; they want the system to change, from the ground up. They want to see a system which they describe as “fair” – a system where life is a playable game.
What will this mean for Palestine, though? What will it mean for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and for the Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, or in exile? When the Israeli government falls, and the New Deal protesters are asking for is worked out in detail, Israel will be at a turning point. It can either continue as an apartheid state – or step back and reorganize as the kind of entity Azmi Bishara described as “a state for all its citizens”.
The timing, so close to September and the declaration of statehood in the Bantustans of the West Bank, is fortuitous: it would be fairly easy to preempt that, and declare a single state, with a sharing of resources and power among all its citizens – which would allow the resources to be diverted from military adventurism to the sort of state that the protesters are demanding. It is a possible path from here to there, and the very first such possible path I’ve seen. There are, however, other possibilities: Netanyahu could pull out the war card, to galvanize people behind fear of a perceived enemy; or the Israelis might decide that they actually like living in an apartheid environment, and upon rethinking it, decide to maintain that structure.
The protests are radically different from anything I’ve seen in Israel, ever. I am cautiously hopeful that they could lead to one state, with equal rights for all, regardless of ethnicity, and an ingathering of Palestinian exiles. Inshallah.
Geller and Spencer’s work actually shaped Breivik’s ideas, Walt explains
Jul 31, 2011
Philip Weiss
I’ve been afraid to go too hard after mass-murderer Anders Breivik for citing Islamophobic blogger Pamela Geller because people will respond that Osama bin Laden has cited Jimmy Carter and Walt and Mearsheimer. Steve Walt deals with this question in a great post on Breivik. On the intellectual culpability issue, he says that OBL did what he did without reading Walt and Mearsheimer, while the same cannot likely be said about Breivik/Geller:
As you’d expect, some of [Robert Spencer and Pam Geller’s] defenders have pointed out that the late Osama bin Laden also cited some writers favorably, including Noam Chomsky, Michael Scheuer, and yours truly. Bin Laden also mentioned John Perkins (author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man) and Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The defenders suggest that these two situations are identical and accuse those who see a link between Breivik and his Islamophobic inspirations of a double standard.
This line of defense is pretty silly because it completely ignores conventional notions of causality. Osama bin Laden began his terrorist career over a decade before the authors he cited had even started the books to which he subsequently referred. He didn’t need to read Chomsky, Perkins, Scheuer, or me in order to develop his violently fundamentalist outlook; it was firmly in place long before I wrote one word and wholly at odds with the central views of the people to whom he referred. Indeed, I doubt he ever read my work; if he had, I wonder what he made of our defense of Israel’s right to exist, our condemnation of terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular, and our explicit denunciations of anti-Semitism?
By contrast, it is clear from Breivik’s own statements that his thinking was shaped by the various Islamophobic writers whose work he cites (and whose websites he patronized and posted on). He wasn’t dreaming up terrorist plots 20 years ago and then citing these writers after the fact to justify it; on the contrary, these works apparently helped convince him that radical violence was necessary in part because there was a looming danger to “the West.” Geller, Spencer, and their ilk are not responsible for his specific decisions and actions, of course, but they do bear some responsibility for creating and promoting a vision of cultural conflict that makes such extreme responses more likely.
I’d say the distinction Walt makes extends to the bizarre ideas that neocons came up with, that George W. Bush then deployed in Iraq. And I’d add this: Breivik might actually be called an intellectual, if a twisted one; his manifesto is very articulate about repulsive ideas. Ideas that Geller and Spencer share. And I bet that if you had shown his arguments about “cultural Marxism” and political correctness and Islam’s threat to Geller a couple of weeks ago, she’d have agreed with them wholeheartedly. I wonder what in his manifesto she’d disagree with!
Palestinian photo-journalist says he was attacked by Israeli soldiers for ‘misrepresenting’ them
Jul 31, 2011
annie
Why is it so important we do not forget the determination and sacrifice of non-violent Palestinian protesters? Take a moment to watch Israel’s soldiers take over a property in Nabi Saleh (3:05) and proceed to pick out young men amongst the protesters and lead them off for arrest. How long will they be imprisoned? Interrogated? Separated from their families for this nonviolent action?
See all those people in the video documenting the protest and arrests? And here is Ma’an News’s photo of photographer Moheeb Al-Barghouthi after the protest.
Ma’an News reports:
Palestinian photojournalist Moheeb Al-Barghouthi was beaten by Israeli soldiers on Friday while covering an anti-wall protest in Nabi Saleh near Ramallah.
Al-Barghouthi, who works for the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, suffered head injuries and sustained bruises across his body in the attack.
He said soldiers destroyed his camera and confiscated some of his equipment.
The journalist said the soldiers accused him of “misrepresenting” the image of Israeli forces. They left him bleeding and handcuffed on the ground in intense heat for several hours, he added.
From Joseph Dana: Israel’s Reaction to Palestinian Nonviolence Threatens Israeli Democracy
Israeli reactions to Palestinian nonviolent resistance have been swift and explicit. Underlying the Israeli response is the desire to maintain control of the carefully crafted narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The narrative of a human rights struggle overshadowing the current peace process is one that Israel has long feared. In fact, the mainstream understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been framed as both sides striving for peace, sometimes in good faith and sometimes not. However, Israel’s recent reactions to Palestinian nonviolence, both locally and on an international scale, reflect the existence of Israel’s internal problem of maintaining an ethnic democratic state battling increasingly visible expressions of nonviolent resistance to its colonial management of the territories.
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Israel has successfully deflected criticism of its actions by stressing its exceptional position in the Middle East as the only democracy. In a region of authoritarian dictatorships, the logic goes, Israel’s maintenance of a liberal democracy has provided the rationale for giving the country wiggle room in its dealing with difficult security decisions, including the maintenance of a 44-year-old occupation of land secured in a pre-emptive war. Palestinian nonviolent resistance is cracking away at Israel’s exceptional position in the Middle East by demonstrating the power which nonviolence has in situations of oppression. In the build up to the September vote on Palestinian statehood, Palestinians will continue to use nonviolence while the looming question hangs in the air – will Palestinians be able to sustain their nonviolence in the face of violent Israeli provocations?
I dreamed of Jerusalem
Jul 31, 2011
Sarah Ali
It starts with a smile. A faint one apparently. But that doesn’t matter. I know as long as I’m smiling, nobody can wake me up. I shall keep the smile on my face. And I shall go on dreaming.
I had a dream…
I can hear my wife whisper something to the kids, but I’m pretending to be asleep. I am trying to stay focused on the dream: the trees, Jerusalem, my friend.
Sadly, it happens that each time a sweet dream forces itself into my distressing thoughts, a fly would keep buzzing till I furiously start swinging my hand trying to keep it away. I would end up hitting my face, and the fly actually wins! I open my eyes and wonder if that was the end; I so much regret waking up to the extent that I would pathetically try to close my eyes again and make the dream last a bit longer. I fail, miserably.
Last night I had a dream…
This time was different though. Trees were all I could see. Jerusalem looked so close. And my friend was alive. I felt like going on as long as possible. I knew by waking up I would be uprooting my own trees, abandoning my Jerusalem, and killing my buddy. This time, I kept my eyes close. This time, I fought for my dream.
When I was 17 years old, I dropped out of school. My father was a farmer but wanted me to go to college and become a doctor. However, I loved to take care of our land. Of the lemon trees. I told him study was not my thing, but he insisted that I go back to school. I did. I became a teacher, and my father died, leaving me with a piece of land full of lemon trees.
The trees were there in my dream, standing so beautifully.
When I was 11, the family decided to go on a trip to Jerusalem, the city of dreams. It was not that expensive to go there at the time, nor was it too difficult to travel. It happened quite easily. It ended so fast.
Last night Jerusalem seemed to be a few meters away, a lot nearer than it was when we went on that visit.
When I was 8, I met Mu’aath, who later became my best friend. We threw stones together and because I was kind of a coward, I used to run away and leave him behind each time an Israeli tank got too close. He never left his spot. Mu’aath seemed like a true hero—at least to me.
He was always throwing stones. Even in the dream!
Last night I had a beautiful dream… trees, Jerusalem, my friend.
Now it’s 5:55 a.m. In a few minutes, the alarm will start ringing, my wife will start nagging me to get up, and a hideous fly might come over to take part in the wake-up drama. My eyes are tightly closed. I guess I’m going to take the day off. Well the UNRWA might deduct some bucks, but that is fine. Now I need to concentrate. Trees are all I can see. Jerusalem looks so close. My friend is alive.
Last night I had a dream, and it was when my wife shook my body I realized that the lemons were gone long ago, that Jerusalem is 79 kms (and a checkpoint and a fence and a soldier) away from me, and that Mu’aath was shot to death. I could no longer fake the smile, for the dream was truly over.
Last night I had a dream…
It ends with a smile. A fake one, indeed. But that doesn’t matter. I know as long as I’m smiling, nobody can wake me up. I shall keep that smile. And I shall go on dreaming…
Of the lemon trees. Of Jerusalem. Of Mu’aath.
Sarah Ali is a Gazan blogger. This is crossposted @ her blog Here We Are
LGBTs in Israel declare, our struggle is against hasbara and pinkwashing
Jul 31, 2011
Philip Weiss
Oh my lord, is the Arab spring coming to Israel at last? Here is the Jerusalem Post reporting on the 10th annual Jerusalem Gay Pride day parade of last Thursday:
‘The theme of this year’s march, led by Jerusalem’s Open House, is “Intertwined Paths,” honoring the way the gay struggle has dovetailed with popular struggles for equal rights, housing, minimum wage and other social issues. The theme was chosen four months ago, but is especially resonant given the current tent protests sweeping the country, which are entering their second week.’
Remember that it is queers inside the American Jewish community who have been among the boldest in helping to liberate Jews from Zionism– because they’ve already broken out of archaic thinking in a radical struggle of their own. From Israel, Radically blonde says it all:
In the last couple of years, I have had the growing feeling that the main struggle of the LGBT community in Israel, or to be exact the main struggle done in the name of the LGBT community in Israel, is the Israeli Hasbara diplomatic struggle.
They use us to promote tourism to Israel. We are used to mock the flotilla initiative.
They use us to wash in pink the blood that Israel has been spilling.
They use us as the fig leaf meant to hide the state’s shame.
They use us in order to portray the state of Israel as liberal and enlightened, waving around the flag of rights that were never granted to us, the flag of security that we’ve never felt, the flag of equality and acceptance that we’ve never experienced.
This is not our struggle!
Thanks to Eleanor Kilroy.
Boycott is a no-brainer, Nadia Hijab writes from Washington, but in a Lebanese newspaper
Jul 31, 2011
Kate
and other news from Today in Palestine:
Land, property, resources theft & destruction / Ethnic cleansing / Apartheid
A stir over sign language / Ofer Aderet
Haaretz 29 July — A recently discovered trove of documents from the 1950s reveals a nasty battle in Jerusalem over the hebraization of street and neighborhood names. This campaign is still raging today.
link to www.haaretz.com
Disguised Israeli security men arrest 6 Palestinians in Silwan
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (PIC) 30 July — Disguised Israeli security men arrested six Palestinian young men in Wadi Rababa in Silwan town in occupied Jerusalem in a pre-dawn raid on Saturday, eyewitnesses reported. They said that the disguised policemen backed by a special force stormed the suburb and arrested the youths near the sit-in tent held to protest settlement activity in the Bustan suburb in Silwan. The witnesses said that identity of the young men and reasons for their detention were not known yet. The disguised security personnel usually speak Arabic and infiltrate among the Arab masses without being recognized.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk
Report: Israel plans to build separation wall in Golan
GOLAN, Syria (Ma‘an) 30 July — Israeli authorities plan to build a wall in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, the official Syrian news agency SANA reported Friday. The wall will separate the town of Majdal Shams in Israeli-occupied territory from the suburb of Al-Oude and Ain Al-Tinah in Syria, SANA reported. SANA said the cement wall would be four kilometers long and eight meters high. Earlier this year, Israeli forces killed at least 27 people in the area during demonstrations against the Israeli occupation.
link to www.maannews.net
Settlers / Right-wingers
Jewish settlers desecrate graveyard
[photo] AL-KHALIL (PIC) 30 July — Jewish settlers, escorted by Israeli occupation forces, burst into and desecrated a graveyard north of Al-Khalil on Friday and performed Talmudic rituals in it. Eyewitnesses said that tens of armed settlers forced their way into the Islamic burial ground in Khirbat Jala west of Beit Ummar village to the north of Al-Khalil and offered prayers. They pointed out that the settlers were roaming nearby areas while carrying maps, adding that the settlers were looking for water springs and wells.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk
Israelis attack Arab-Jewish protest tent
TEL AVIV (WAFA) 30 July — Right-wing Israelis Friday attacked an Arab-Jewish tent, tore down a Palestinian flag and destroyed signs in the tent city on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, according to Israeli sources. The tent city was set up in Tel Aviv two weeks ago when dozens of Israelis moved out of their homes to live in the streets, protesting high rent and housing prices. The protests spread across several Israeli cities as well. Arab citizens of Israel had also joined the protests, which seems to have irked right-wing anti-Arab Israelis.
link to english.wafa.ps
Israeli forces
Israeli soldiers attack Palestinian journalist
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) — Palestinian photojournalist Moheeb Al-Barghouthi was beaten by Israeli soldiers on Friday while covering an anti-wall protest in Nabi Saleh near Ramallah.
Al-Barghouthi, who works for the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, suffered head injuries and sustained bruises across his body in the attack. He said soldiers destroyed his camera and confiscated some of his equipment. The journalist said the soldiers accused him of “misrepresenting” the image of Israeli forces. They left him bleeding and handcuffed on the ground in intense heat for several hours, he added.
link to www.maannews.net
Palestinian farmer wounded in IOF shooting
GAZA (PIC) 30 July — A Palestinian farmer was wounded [in the] north of the Gaza Strip at noon Saturday when Israeli occupation forces (IOF) opened fire at a group of farmers in the area, medical sources said. Adham Abu Salmiya, the spokesman for medical services, said that a farmer in his twenties was taken to hospital after sustaining injuries in the IOF shooting to the north of Beit Lahia, [in the] north of the Gaza Strip. He described the youth’s condition as moderate to serious, adding that he was hit with a bullet in the head.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk
Gaza
UN Rights Committee breaks 43-year Israeli taboo on Gaza
UNITED NATIONS (IPS) 29 July — When the United Nations General Assembly created a three- member special committee to investigate Israeli human rights violations in occupied territories back in December 1968, the Jewish state reacted with obvious anger. And not surprisingly, the committee was barred from entering any of the occupied territories – forcing the three members to hold sittings in Cairo, Amman and Damascus where Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were given a hearing twice a year. But geopolitics in the region has dramatically changed the political climate — much to the chagrin of the Israelis. For the first time in 43 years, members of the ‘U.N. Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices in Occupied Territories’ gained entry into Gaza last week, through Egypt which has ousted its Israeli-friendly president, Hosni Mubarak.
link to ipsnews.net
so rich in trees
[photos] InGaza 30 July — “Gaza, a city so rich in trees as to be like a cloth of brocade spread out on the sand.” The other night I was flipping through Mahfouz’s Palestine: A Guide, by Mariam Shahin. In my browsing, I came across two different references to Gaza’s former fertility, so lavish that I had to note them, as one would today believe these were lies. The second: “Beit Lahiya (in Roman times): Then its sweet water nourished delicious fruits and beautiful gardens. It once looked like a forest, with many apple, fig, peach and orange trees.” I try to imagine the flourish of green with flowering buds… but can’t. There are trees in Gaza, sparsely pitched and stunted by water shortages or re-planting after Israeli bulldozing …But since I first came here in November 2008, every time I’ve gone to border regions, I’ve been told by proud locals: this was the most beautiful area of Gaza, people used to come from all over with picnics, to enjoy the trees, the birds, the flowers. Beit Hanoun and Faraheen locals rival with their memories, and surely all along the Green-Line border separating Gaza and Israel there were such bounties of green..
link to ingaza.wordpress.com
Blast in central Gaza market damages storefront
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 30 July — An explosive charge blew off the front of a mini market in central Jabaliya refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on Saturday morning, causing extensive damage to the store, onlookers said. Eyewitnesses said the blast, which occurred in the early morning hours, caused major structural damage to the storefront in the Tal Az-Za‘atar area as well as three nearby residences. Security forces in Gaza arrived at the scene and opened an investigation.
link to www.maannews.net
Iranian gallery opens its doors in Gaza
GulfNews 30 July — Gaza: Despite the limited space observers and artists gathered for the opening of the first Iranian art gallery in the Palestinian territories. The Iranian flag was on display at the ‘Greetings to the Resistance’ gallery. The show is part of the Iranian festival of resistance. Most of the paintings represented the Palestinian resistance and the occupation.
link to gulfnews.com
Will you marry me under occupation? / Eva Bartlett
NI 29 July — Wedding season began weeks ago with the first convoys of honking cars overloaded with singing, dancing, cheering shebab [guys]. From 4pm onwards, the beeping cars and wedding bands – five or more musicians dressed in traditional trousers and blouses, playing different-sized drums and something akin to a kazoo – blot out all other noise as they pass my apartment every half hour or so, en route to the seaside wedding halls. Gaza evenings are filled with the sounds of celebration. Those who can scrape together the money to rent one of Gaza’s many wedding halls do so — borrowing, taking a bank loan, or if they are lucky having saved from years of work — and invite a few hundred of their family, relatives and friends to the night of dancing.
link to www.newint.org
Activism / Solidarity / Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions
VIDEO: Cyclists join Bil‘in weekly protest 29 July
by Haitham Khatib 3:58 minutes — …Participants used a megaphone to call to the settlers, who are in the illegal settlement (Mattiaho Mzrah) built on the lands of Bil‘in, to leave the area and return to their original homeland and return the land to the Palestinians. As the marchers walked along the concrete wall, they were able to destroy part of the barbed wire located along the concrete wall. On their part, Israeli soldiers fired live bullets and tear gas at demonstrators, injuring several demonstrators, and ignited a fire in the fields adjacent to the wall. The Israeli occupation army chased the participants in the fields and mountains in an attempt to arrest the participants.
link to www.youtube.com
Photos: South African rally in Capetown for sending aid to Gaza
AJ 29 July — South Africans in Cape Town’s Mitchells Plain attend a rally that seeks to send aid to Gaza in the hope of breaking its blockade on the Palestinians.
link to blogs.aljazeera.net
Apartheid agents not welcome on our campuses
PACBI 27 July — The South African Students Congress (SASCO) in Gauteng province notes with dismay the advanced preparations by the Israeli Apartheid regime to send a group of 27 Israeli students to South African universities in a desperate attempt to improve the ravaged image of Israel. These apartheid agents, camouflaged as private and impartial students, are expected to arrive in South Africa on 11 August 2011. The targeted institutions of higher learning by these agents include universities around Tshwane and Johannesburg, especially the University of Johannesburg (UJ) … We call upon all universities to follow the heroic example of the University of Johannesburg by cutting ties with universities aligned to the Apartheid regime. We further urge all progressive forces in our country to join us in the protest at OR Tambo International Airport when the Apartheid agents arrive on the 11th of August 2011.
link to pacbi.org
Video: 500 protesters join boycott demo at Max Brenner store in Australia / Annie
Mondoweiss 30 July — Hundreds of BDS demonstrators gathered again yesterday at Melbourne’s Central Business District to protest against the attack and arrest of 19 nonviolent BDS supporters on July 1st as reported here by Kim Bullimore. Victorian Police had previously arrested demonstrators at the Max Brenner cafe, owned by the Israeli Strauss Group, which directly funds two IDF brigades, the Golani and Givati brigades. The 19 protesters now face exorbitant fines of up to $30,000.
link to mondoweiss.net
Lower the debt — End US aid to Israel: 10 things you can do!
US Campaign to End the Occupation 29 July — We know that cutting off the $30 billion in weapons pledged to Israel from 2009 to 2018 won’t solve our country’s gargantuan $14.3 trillion debt crisis, but it sure would help. From a moral and financial perspective, we cannot afford to provide Israel with the weapons it misuses to sustain its illegal 44-year military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip. Here are 10 things you can do to advance our coalition’s ongoing campaign to educate people in the United States about the true costs of arming Israel and mobilize them to end our country’s military support for Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights:
link to blog.endtheoccupation.org
For human rights activists, boycotting Israel is a no-brainer / Nadia Hijab
Daily Star 29 July — Making the Palestinian case has never been a problem. It is a powerful story grounded in universal principles of human rights and in international law. The question has always been how to shift the balance between one of the strongest military powers in the world and a people struggling with occupation, inequality and exile. That question began to be answered not long ago.
link to www.dailystar.com.lb
Palestinians prepare for massive uprising / Mel Frykberg
BEIT UMMAR, Occupied West Bank (IPS) 29 July — Leading members of the Palestinian Popular Committees in the West Bank plan massive civil unrest and disobedience against the Israeli occupation authorities come September when the Palestinians take their case for statehood to the UN. “We plan to take to the streets en masse,” Musa Abu Maria, a leading member of the Popular Committee in Beit Ummar, a town 11 km north of Hebron in the southern West Bank told IPS. “We will block entire highways leading to and from Israel’s illegal settlements. We will march on settlements. But these will be non-violent and the protesters will be peaceful. “We have worked out creative strategies to bring the occupation increasingly to the attention of the international community and the world media. We will be coordinating with our international supporters in Europe and America to increase international recognition of the Palestinian predicament as the tide turns in our favour,” added Abu Maria.
link to www.ipsnews.net
Detention
Two Palestinians arrested for working in Jerusalem
BETHLEHEM (PIC) 30 July — Israeli police have detained two Palestinian men in a crackdown on Palestinian workers in Israel and occupied Jerusalem. Locals identified those men as Ahmed Adel Hajajira, 19, from Ayeda refugee camp and Mohammed Ibrahim Hajajira, from al-Deheisha refugee camp. They were taken from their work place in Jabal Abu Gneim for allegedly working without obtaining work permits required to enter and work in occupied Jerusalem.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk
Jenin teacher arrested at Jordan border
JENIN (Ma‘an) — Israel’s army arrested a teacher last Sunday at the Jordan bridge border crossing, his relatives said. Mufeed Jalghum works at a school in the northern West Bank city of Jenin. He was on his way back from Saudi Arabia performing the annual Umrah pilgrimage, his brother Abed Al-Hakim told Ma‘an. Mufeed was transferred to Al-Jalamah prison, Abed added. It was not immediately clear why he was arrested.
link to www.maannews.net
IOF soldiers arrest Jordanian Lifeline activist
AMMAN (PIC) 30 July — Israeli occupation forces (IOF) arrested a Jordanian activist while crossing into the West Bank from Jordan to visit relatives in Al-Khalil province two week ago, his family said. They told the PIC reporter in Amman on Saturday that Hamza Al-Dabbas, 29, who is carrying a Jordanian passport, was detained on 10/7/2011 by the Israeli intelligence. The relatives said that ever since then they did not have any information about Dabbas, who is a member of the Jordanian Lifeline convoy that sends humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip and who works with the Jordanian engineers syndicate. They said that none of his relatives was informed of his whereabouts, adding that the Jordanian government did nothing so far.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk
Political / Diplomatic / International news
Dahlan flees to Jordan blasts Abbas over raid
Daily Star 30 July — BEIRUT: Former Fatah leader Mohammad Dahlan issued a scathing attack on rival Fatah President Mahmoud Abbas Friday after the Palestinian security forces raided his house in Ramallah and arrested his guards Thursday. Dahlan arrived in the Jordanian capital Amman following the raid late Thursday, according to a report in Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Ray. In an exclusive statement issued to Al-Ray, Dahlan said: “Abu Mazen [Abbas] is personally responsible for what has happened to me in Ramallah. He has brought shame upon us and he is trying to establish a dictatorship at a stage where all dictatorships are gone,” adding that Abbas “pretends to protect the law but at the same time he breaks into people’s houses which he is supposed to protect.”
link to www.dailystar.com.lb
Fatah lawmakers from Gaza slam Dahlan raid
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 30 July — Fatah lawmakers from Gaza on Saturday denounced the raid on Mohammad Dahlan’s home in Ramallah by Palestinian Authority security forces … They said it was an attack on Dahlan’s parliamentary immunity and personal freedom, and violated Palestinian basic law.
link to www.maannews.net
Other news
Fatah leader dies in Ramallah
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) 30 July — Member of the Fatah revolutionary council and former lawmaker and women’s activist Jamila Seidam died Saturday in Ramallah, party officials said. She was 64. The Fatah movement mourned her death in a statement. “Um Sabri” is survived by her husband, Mamadouh Seidam, who is serving the party as a member of its central committee.
link to www.maannews.net
Assailants open fire on Egypt gas pipeline to Israel
dpw/Reuters 30 July — Pipeline attack is third to take place during month of July; No group is claiming responsibility for attack — Witnesses said the station had not been repaired since the blast earlier in July.
link to www.haaretz.com
Analysis / Opinion
Building the Palestinian dream on shaky ground / Hagai Amit
Haaretz 30 July — The planned city of Rawabi could be embodiment of many Palestinian aspirations, but the Palestinian Authority’s UN bid could derail the whole project … Masri says changes in Palestinian society spurred the city’s construction. “The young men coming back from abroad do not want to live in a village that lacks running water three days a week,” he says. “They do not want to sit with their father in the living room every evening and watch news from Jordan.” Masri’s young assistants reflect these changes. They are in their 30s, fluent in English and unmarried. Now, finally, someone intends to free them from having to live with their extended families. Someone is helping them fulfill the Western dream in a new, young city.
link to www.haaretz.com
On Ramadan’s eve, severe financial crunch hitting occupied territories / Khalid Amayreh
Ramallah (UrukNet) 30 July — Muhammed and Sarah Sawabha live at a middle class Ramallah neighborhood, with their six children, including two college students. Muhammed has a Bachelor of Science and earns a monthly salary of about $800 US dollars as a teacher at a local school. His wife, who has a BA in Arabic Language and Literature earns nearly the same amount, teaching Arabic at one of the largest and most prestigious high schools in suburban Ramallah. Like many other Palestinian families, the Sawabhas are ill-prepared to receive the Muslim holy month of Ramadan during which family spending increases substantially. “We always struggled to make ends meet. But this is the first time we feel we are fighting on many fronts and losing,” said Muhammed … According to PA officials, the current financial crisis hitting the occupied territories is probably the severest in living memory
link to www.uruknet.info
Analysis: Donor aid boosts West Bank infrastructure despite impediments
RAMALLAH (IRIN) 29 July – West Bank infrastructure projects have increased as a result of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) state-building efforts and increased donor funding, although significant barriers to implementation remain, report officials from Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad’s office, PA ministries and donors. Infrastructure, intertwined with economic development, is seen as the backbone of a future state under the framework of the 2008 Palestinian Reform and Development Plan (PRDP), the government’s comprehensive effort to prepare for an independent Palestinian state by September 2011. The PA has succeeded in connecting almost all residential areas to the electricity grid (99.8 percent of the population now connected), repair thousands of kilometres of roads, as well as improve the water and sanitation networks since 2008.
link to www.irinnews.org
Rightist Knesset members welcome Russian neo-Nazis to Knesset, Yad Vashem / Richard Silverstein
Tikun Olam 29 July — When an Israeli reader sent this story (Hebrew) to me I couldn’t believe the headline summarized above. Further, in this day and age of Norwegian neo-Nazi, anti-jihadi attacks which wrap themselves in the Israeli flag, this story is simply mind-blowing. It begins with a visit from a Russian neo-Nazi delegation to Israel. Under the auspices of Tuvia Lerner, editor of the Russian edition of Arutz 7, the media voice of the settler movement, they inveigled themselves an invitation to meet with far-right MKs Aryeh Eldad and Ayoob Kara.
link to www.richardsilverstein.com
Netanyahu’s next move: War? / Yossi Gurvitz
+972mag 29 July — Netanyahu does not have many cards left to play. His way out his current political troubles may be a war – and we should be ready for it, and reject it — …I’m hearing from several quarters that Netanyahu has only two rabbits left in his hat. One of them is the release of captive soldier Gilad Shalit, who has become a sort of celebrity in Israel. It’s not at all clear this will end the protests, and the maneuver becomes complicated because it requires the agreement of Hamas, which, for its own part, is in no rush … The other rabbit is going to a splendid little war. Or, if not a full-fledged war, a massive operation which looks just like the real thing. This schtick rarely fails. Israeli air force planes circled over Gaza last night, and in general the IDF seems to be heating the Gaza sector in the last few weeks … I do know, however, that security officials in the north have received an official warning from the government (Hebrew) that September is going to be hot. Possibly a war, possibly against the Palestinians, possibly against the Israeli Palestinians, possibly against Hizbullah. It is worth noting that, contrary to myth, most of Israel’s wars were propagated by it, often for a political reason.
link to 972mag.com
New moves to curb criticism of Israel in US and Canada / Kristin Szremski
EI 29 July — A number of new initiatives to curtail freedom of speech by conflating opposition to Israeli crimes with anti-Semitism are underway in the United States and Canada.
link to electronicintifada.net
groups.yahoo.com/group/f_shadi (listserv)
www.theheadlines.org (archive)
Latest twist in Sanchez tailspin underscores cost of being accused of anti-Semitism
Jul 31, 2011
Philip Weiss
The other day DailyKos accused me of anti-Semitism and I hit back hard. Since then I’ve reflected on how damaging a charge of anti-Semitism can be. And it’s a lot worse for non-Jews than for me– I’m somewhat insulated against the charge cuz I’m Jewish. I believe that Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer refused to debate Alan Dershowitz because he’d called them anti-Semites, and I now fully understand their refusal to grant a platform to the person who makes such a charge.
Back in 2002 or so a bunch of Harvard and MIT professors signed on to a divest-from Israel initiative, and then-Harvard president Larry Summers said the initiative was anti-Semitic in effect if not intent; and his statement crushed the initiative. I remember interviewing a couple of the professors at the time. They were terrified. They didn’t want their names used. They had basically crawled under their desks, afraid of what the charge could do to their careers.
As Jefferson Morley wrote recently, it doesn’t matter that he married a Jew; because he supports boycott of Israel, “I am by the current norms of the nation’s capital, a borderline anti-Semite whose views have no place in respectable debates in Washington.”
You’ll remember that venerable Helen Thomas paid a dear price, her career, for saying that Jews should leave Israel. Later Thomas further angered Jewish organizations by making comments about Jewish influence in Washington, on policymaking and on media institutions.
That didn’t stop the Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn from unveiling a bust of her.
The bust is interesting. It demonstrates that notwithstanding the fearful orthodoxy around even talking about Jewish power, we have one conversation in shadow and one conversation in the light. People want to talk about these issues, because they’re obviously important. But an open debate is not allowed. There’s fear of a backlash of persecution of Jews if people talked publicly about stuff they’re already talking about privately.
Rick Sanchez got fired from CNN last year after accusing Jon Stewart of bigotry during a radio interview and then scoffing at his interviewer’s suggestion that Jews are a powerless minority– saying that Jews are all over the media. Steve Sailer gets off a quip about Jewish powerlessness, and adds:
Less than ten months later, Sanchez has now gotten a part-time job. Well, it’s not actually a job, since he isn’t getting paid to do it. Mediaite reported on July 27:
According to the Miami Herald, ex-CNN anchor Rick Sanchez will be back this fall–on the radio in South Florida–calling football games for the FIU Golden Panthers. … Sanchez says he’s taking the gig to “give something back” to a school he’s close to: “I’m extremely excited to be volunteering my time to Florida International…”